MyGolfSpy: State of the Forum (Monthly Updates)

[The TXBexar]

4 hours ago, Shrek74 said:

... I've tried to sell things there for a while but get hardly any looks, if any at all. My guess is people just don't know about it due to the fact the BST seems to be "hidden" from everyone and isn't anywhere in the open or with any focus on the main page or elsewhere. You have to go digging for it in order to find it. Perhaps putting it more center stage on the main page or something like that might kick up the activity. I know I'd rather sell things to those here at a lower price than what I have to do elsewhere like eBay or FB...

That's the real issue with it, that it isn't in a intuitive spot or localized with the other parts of the forum; hard to get eyes on something that people don't realize exists, and probably couldn't find that easily even if they wanted too. 

But, I did recently score a helluva deal on there that I probably wouldn't have gotten if other poeple had seen it, sooo maybe it should stay a small hidden gem for the few of us that know where it is LoL.

[Javs]

Thank you @GolfSpy_APH and all the mods. You all work extremely hard to provide us a first class forum, testing and fun tournaments. Greatly appreciate all your work. The stats were just incredible!

[WaffleHouseTour]

10 hours ago, Rob Person said:

I only see the ads when I am on the main gauge site, where the articles are

 

[Rob Person]

10 hours ago, WaffleHouseTour said:

 

I use mobile interaction, but even in desktop mode I don't see them

 

 

[GolfSpy_APH]

2 hours ago, Rob Person said:

I use mobile interaction, but even in desktop mode I don't see them

 

 

Just a warning - the Masters theme will be defunct come out next update as it's an old system that cannot be updated

[KC Golf]

On 9/4/2024 at 7:21 PM, GolfSpy_APH said:

As I had mentioned previously I have been lacking here a little bit, but for good reason. There is so much else going on that we need to prioritze certain areas and ongoing projects. 

First one I am going to mention as we still have several new members, if you want to join our focus group send me a PM with why you would like to join it and how you feel you can contribute! 

Next is for the remainder of 2024 we are putting a freeze on scheduling new testing opportunities. We have some 16 to 18 remaining for 2024 before we reach into the 2025 season. There are a few pending, and those we will add in if they fit, but we are now putting our focus into 2025 (where we already have several lined up).  

But Jamie, why would we want to do this? Isn't more better or more a goal of the staff and forum. 

Well consider we will have had some 80 or so testing opportunities this season in total and have selected over 400 members I think we are safe to say we have had a fair share. Truthfully I don't know if we will ever reach this  capacity again. It has been a lot of work and while great, we have found that our testing pool is really shrunk... which will lead to the next question. 

Wait, testing pool is shrunk? But I haven't been selected yet for anything!

I would say read the How To Be A Tester Thread, but that should have made things clear by now. If you are a member who signs up for everything or a lot of opportunities but doesn't actively contribute, sorry but that isn't what we are looking for. Read that thread, it will help and if it doesn't I am not sure what else I can say. 

Will next year have the same flow of member tests? 

Maybe, we are still working on that. However our expectations are growing from our testers. We are putting more guardrails in place to help make it easier, but testers have a huge commitment to make on this now more than ever. 

We have had a lot of great reviews, but also several MIA reviews or ones that were just poorly done and this is a reason why we are likely going to step back on the number that we offer in 2025. There are several who have got the chance to do reviews now that will not get the chance again, or at least won't for a won't for a longer period of time. 

If you have more questions, feel free to send me a PM or ask here. 

How the forum is performing

We have slowed since since April, especially in June and July, however looking over time this is a fairly typical trend. August rebounded a little bit and we saw a nice bump, no doubt has to do with some equipment releases etc. 

Number of posts per month. August was just under 15k and April was our high of 19k.

Now in comparison the start of 2019, this is night and day and we are really proud of what we have managed to accomplish as a community. 

It is great to see our "bad" month be as high as our great months from last season. 

We also see a similar correlation in registrations. 

2020 had an obvious boom and we had our slow period before taking off once again last season. 

Finally we also have seen similar trends with the number of topics created, this is a key piece of data that I look at as we want people creating new topics to discuss their various thoughts, ideas, opinions and more. 

I expect to see similar boosts as new releases come out and all that good stuff. 

What other data do you look at? (non member testing)A

At the beginning of the season or year I created some goals for the Forum. This included the following. 

Registration totals - Goal 15,000
Post Totals - Goal 150,000
Topics - 4400
Advertisements (classifieds) - 500
Reactions - 550,000
Users Receiving Reactions: 6000
Users who followed content: 15,000
Users who reacted: 3000
Unique Contributors (this is the number of members that contributed a pieced of content and the most important in my eyes): 9000

For reference all of these were significantly higher goals than previous years totals going back to 2018, with a few exceptions as the forum has changed the way we do things and that has a significant influence on some of these data points. Take Unique Contributors - Tester Wanted comments don't count towards this data point, the old system had people make comments in the threads so we have to look at 2021 numbers and on. 

Registration goals was 1000 higher than we have ever had in the forum history with 2020 boasting 14k new members... this year so far we have 22k. Huge and is so cool to see. 

Post count high was 126k back in 2020 as well (remember to sign up you had to make a post so those are inflated numbers. This season so far we are at 123k and doubling our 2022 totals. Still some work to do to get to 150k, but I think it is still attainable. 

Topics same high in 2020 with 5500, but again different erra. We have consistently been about 3800 since and are at 3500 ytd. 

Adverts are down and an area I would really like to see boosted, so if you have stuff to sell try making a post and getting it up on our BST! We sit at 127 ytd. 

Another reference as I look at this, we have had 13000 comments in the testers wanted threads which is 5k more than any other year and would put us at closer to 140k total for the forum year. 

Reactions have been crushed (Thank you good morning thread) with over 620k reactions ytd. Maybe next year I need to make it 1 million, but looking at it this is still over 200k more than any other year. 

Users getting reactions goal of 6000 was surpassed this month with 6063 ytd. 

Users who followed was crushed (in part to how we have registrations done) and we have had 24k 

Users who reacted will likely have been passed now, but at the time of making the report was at 2983 which was 17 shy of the goal. 

Finally unique contributors. Again these are people who are actually contributing something throughout the season in non-testers wanted threads. Looking back we had between 8-15k in years 2018-2020. These numbers are expected to be higher, because anyone saying pick me or I want to be a tester would have been included. The following year we still had a portion of this system in place until the new one testing platform was created. However it was still at 8000. 2022 and 2023 were 4000 and 6700. 2022 was a particularly down season for the forum and 2023 was where we started to turn things around. This is where my goal of 9k came from. It was about the average what we had seen when activity had been highest and 2300 more than the previous year. Well we managed to best that this month and have 9100 total. Could we beat 12k by the end of the year? Maybe, I would love to see it. 

That is a lot to read and take in, but hopefully it helps you understand some of the other things we see and look at. I do run all the GA4 data each month as well and without getting into huge details I will say that YTD we have had 2.9 million people visit our Forum... I will let that sink in a little. 

2.9 million. 

I don't have data from over the years as this was not available to us. 

The Forum socials have seen a stupid amount of growth as well, thank you to Hayes for all the work there and we will continue to try and grow this platform. 

So why is this important?

Some of this comes back to member testing, but being prepared with all this data as well as a our newsletter data and information makes it an easier sell to the OEMs. It is a huge reason why we have been able to get the likes of TaylorMade, PING, PXG and more. We are able to provide Forum value and of course the added benefits with exposure on the main site as well. 

Of course there are advertising dollars that come in, however I am not privy to those numbers. I know the ads can be annoying and obnoxious, but they are important for us to keep things flowing and the make sure that the staff who work so hard at keeping this place going can be compensated as well. We have made many tweaks to the ad experience and I can say I run the same ads as you do. 

To answer the question, yes we have considered a premium membership that is ad free, but want to be able to provide further value to those members before we take any proposal to HQ as it would need to be beneficial on both sides. 

The core though is that we want and need a thriving community to keep all of this going. We want to see continue progress and we want to see more people finding the forum and engaging. 

What can you do to help?

It is pretty simple on our end - if you think you can help with idea generation, contributions in various areas then reach out and join the focus group as mentioned up top. We have a current project that we really want and need more help on. 

Let others know about the forum! We don't have a referral program, but the more people that join the more people we may convert into longer term contributors. 

Keep active engaged and help drive content and discussion - The forum shows up on a lot of google searches and the more we can create discussion worthy content the more people will flock to the site. We love to see all of you active and posting, it goes a long ways for all of us! 

Post your scores in the VCT! Even if it just a fun casual round, let's see if we can get up to 500 members posting their scores! I think we are around 150 or so right now, so if you haven't posted yet give it a try! 

Post your used items on our BST. If we can get this going with more activity it would be great to see. 

That is about it, we just want to continue the growth while enjoying what we have built. The forum staff meet every Monday for a meeting to discuss on going work, nonsense, projects and more. Our slack is neverending and always has discussion going on. However we still want to get your feedback. 

2025 will be sure to bring some changes, but we really just want to build on what we have done so far and continue to push the forum forward. 

Stay tuned for another few bigger non-testing announcements coming your way very soon!

Jamie, your leadership along with the work of the other Mods has really made 2024 a fantastic year for the forum.  The bar keeps getting higher and you guys continue to knock it out of the park!  Can’t wait for 2025.  

One small suggestion.  May be for the end of year tests, may be you should reward some of the best testers throughout 2024 and pick a few to do another test prior to year end as a reward for all of their contributions beyond just testing to the forum.  Keep up the great work!

[GolfSpy_APH]

10 minutes ago, KC Golf said:

Jamie, your leadership along with the work of the other Mods has really made 2024 a fantastic year for the forum.  The bar keeps getting higher and you guys continue to knock it out of the park!  Can’t wait for 2025.  

One small suggestion.  May be for the end of year tests, may be you should reward some of the best testers throughout 2024 and pick a few to do another test prior to year end as a reward for all of their contributions beyond just testing to the forum.  Keep up the great work!

Thanks KC

As for the suggestions - I will just say the members who are constant and active contributors will get rewarded year over year. We have had a few who have been selected twice this season now, but the first was smaller and the second was larger or vice versa. 

Truthfully I don't want to get into hand picking prior for a test, that shows a bit too much favortism and I want everyone to feel like they have a shot no matter what. 

I haven't said this yet, but I intend to pick four brand new testers for the test we have this weekend. It is a great opportunity for those newer members to showcase their skills and review ability and is a great product to have 4 brand new members included on it. 

[Rob Person]

9 hours ago, GolfSpy_APH said:

Just a warning - the Masters theme will be defunct come out next update as it's an old system that cannot be updated

Oh noooo.  It's the best theme too!  Its Easy on these glassed up eyes!